


Revenge Is A Dish Best Served At An Undetermined Temperature

by Pink_Tinted_Monocle



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:15:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27084730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pink_Tinted_Monocle/pseuds/Pink_Tinted_Monocle
Summary: On the hunt for new sleeping quarters, Rimmer is finally forced to confront his past when a detour sees him and Lister end up in the very Officer’s Club where the infamous gazpacho soup incident occurred.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	Revenge Is A Dish Best Served At An Undetermined Temperature

**Author's Note:**

> In this fic I’ve gone with the idea that there is more than one Officer’s Club on board Red Dwarf. That is something that for some reason I always just assumed to be the case, but after doing some research I’m pretty sure there is actually only supposed to be one. But I like the idea that there are a few dotted around the ship and that Rimmer has always avoided stepping foot in the one where he was served the gazpacho soup, so I decided to stick with it.

“Do you think the reason they’re called shag pile carpets is because people shag on them a lot?” asked Lister, hands behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling.

Rimmer frowned. “Can’t say I’ve ever given it much thought, Listy. Possibly. Although why then are they called ‘shag pile’ and not just ‘shag’? Where does the pile come in?”

Lister turned his head and looked at Rimmer with a grin. “Maybe it’s ‘cause after you’ve shagged on one and you lie on it for too long after you get piles!”

“And on that note, I’m leaving”, said Rimmer. He started to clamber to his feet but Lister grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back down.

“Rimmer, you can’t just love me and leave me!” Lister protested. “Come on, let’s have a cuddle.”

Rimmer puffed out his cheeks in annoyance. “We’ve got things to do Listy! We can’t just lie down and canoodle all day. We need to finish looking at the rooms on this floor and the next before we take an extended break.”

“It’ll just be a quick one!” said Lister. “Five minutes, tops. _I swear._ Then we can get on. _”_

“ _Fine”,_ Rimmer replied, making himself comfortable on the plush carpet. “But only five minutes!”

Lister turned and pulled the end of a nearby table cloth. It rose into the air with a shower of dust (clearly Kryten hadn’t cleaned this room in a while, Rimmer noted) before it fell to the floor and Lister wrapped it around them. He rested his head on Rimmer’s chest and was soon snoring softly.

Rimmer sighed, resigned to the fact that they were likely to be there for much longer than five minutes. He shifted slightly and grimaced. Was it possible for a hologram to get piles? He wasn’t particularly keen to find out. He let his head fall to one side and stared at the soft carpet. It was deep plum, a rich and luxurious colour. It was also, Rimmer realised with a frown, oddly familiar. He had a memory of walking on a carpet just like this, of glancing down at well-polished dress shoes as they sunk into dark purple softness. When was the last time he had worn those shoes? It was definitely before he died; in the memory he could see a crease in the leather along the toe line, a feature missing from hologrammatic footwear. But when had he worn such smart shoes when he was still alive? There had been the occasional wedding or funeral when he was younger and still living at home, but his feet were fully grown in the memory. There was only one time when he would have worn shoes like that as an adult; that night, that terrible, terrible night…

Rimmer swivelled his head around as far as he could with a still slumbering Lister on his chest, taking in as much of the rest of the room as possible. There was a big table, now devoid of its cloth, with a dozen or so ornate chairs surrounding it. On a sideboard were napkins tied with delicate purple ribbons that matched the carpet next to an assortment of spoons and crockery, as if in preparation for a dinner party. Rimmer knew this, because he’d been to one of those very dinner parties on the worst night of his life.

Because this wasn’t just any room, it was _the_ room, the room that Rimmer had avoided stepping into for the last thirty years. It was the Officer’s Club where he had been served the Gazpacho Soup.

**********************************************************************************

Rimmer had been rudely woken in the early hours of the morning by a thud, a yell and a boot colliding with the side of his head, all in quick succession. He had sat up wildly in the dark, yelling for Holly to turn the lights on, only to be confronted by the glare of a very disgruntled Lister who was sprawled out on the floor. 

Rimmer had blinked groggily, staring down at his irritated lover as he rubbed his temple. “Listy, what are you doing down there at this ungodly hour? Why are you throwing things are me?”

Lister scowled up him. “You rolled me out of bed _again_ , smeghead! I was havin’ a great dream about eating lamb vindaloo with Jim Bexley Speed in a campervan made of cheese. He was just carvin’ a block of cheddar out of the wall so we could grate it on top of our curries when you flopped over and threw me to the ground!

“It wasn’t intentional!” Rimmer said defensively. “You know what I’m like when I’m sleeping, I move around more than Jane Fonda during an aerobics session, I can’t help it!”

Lister hauled himself up, wincing. “Yeah, I know, but it’s the third time this week, Rimmer! I can’t go on like this, man. The other day I was so knackered I dozed off in me cornflakes and got grated onion up me nose!” He sat on the edge of Rimmer’s bunk and sighed deeply. “This just isn’t workin’.”

Rimmer had felt his whole body stiffen and a feeling of cold dread trickled down his spine as he prepared for Lister to break up with him. _It’s fine_ , he told himself (it wasn’t), _I don’t need him_ (he did), _I can still function perfectly well without being able to kiss him whenever I please_ (he couldn’t). 

So it came as an immense relief when Lister simply said, “We need to find a bigger bed. Like, _now._ I swear, if don’t get me head down and have a proper kip soon I’ll be barmier than Holly after… well, I’ll just be barmier than Holly full stop.”

“Oi!” protested Holly, appearing on the vid screen with a frown. Lister ignored him.

And so the pair of them had spent all morning traipsing around the ship, attempting to find a room where both of them were happy to lay their hat (“I don’t have a hat”, Rimmer had said, confused. Lister had rolled his eyes. “It’s just an expression, man.”)

This was easier said than done. Every mattress that was squishy enough for Lister was far too soft for Rimmer, while every mattress that was firm enough for Rimmer had Lister claiming that it’d be more comfortable to sleep on concrete. Lister’s favourite rooms were too bright and garish for Rimmer, while Rimmer’s preferred dwellings were so gloomy and spartan that Lister had sarcastically suggested that they might as well just go and live in the Tank.

After several hours of this, both of them growing more irritable with every rejected abode, they had ended up yelling at each in a random corridor for a good ten minutes before Lister had thrown himself at Rimmer and glued their lips together in a highly charged kiss. Still stuck together they had stumbled into the nearest room and proceeded to have it off on the surprisingly soft carpet. And after that came the conversation about shag-pile, shagging and piles before Lister fell asleep and Rimmer realised with a sickening lurch exactly what room it was they had just made love in.

**********************************************************************************

Rimmer closed his eyes tightly, screwed up his face and waited for the inevitable wave of nerve shattering panic to hit him. Perhaps, if he stayed very, very still during this episode of mental anguish Lister wouldn’t wake up until it was mostly over and he had regained coherent speech and the full use of his limbs. Was it even possible to have a completely silent and motionless anxiety attack? All of his previous ones had been quite obvious and all had ended up with him being committed to the ship’s psychiatric ward on a stretcher with his arms pinned to his sides. What would Lister do if he woke to find Rimmer in such a state? He imagined himself strapped on a bed in the Medi-Bay, Kryten trying to coax him to open his mouth just enough to put a holo-thermometer in it while Lister hovered anxiously by his bedside and the Cat just pointed at him and laughed.

In fact, Rimmer was so busy trying to make his panic attack as non-verbal and unnoticeable as possible that it was several minutes before he realised that he wasn’t actually having a panic attack. But _why_ wasn’t he? This was the room in which all his hopes and dreams had been shattered into a million pieces, the room in which his aspirations to become an officer were taken away from him by a poxy bowl of icy vegetable broth. He remembered how excited he’d been when he finally got an invitation to attend a dinner in one of the Officer’s Clubs, one of those little pockets of exclusivity that seemed to be present on almost every floor, before he’d actually arrived and it had all turned to smeg. He had vowed to himself that night as he left the club in shame that he would never set foot in that room again and he had stuck to that vow for over thirty years. Every time the others suggested a party in an Officer’s Club he had made sure they chose one of the other ones, any other one, just not _this one_. He should be beside himself, wracked with unbearable anguish, but instead he just felt…indifferent.

_There must be an issue with the hologram simulation suite,_ Rimmer thought, desperately trying to think of a reasonable explanation and immediately imagining the worst case scenario. _Maybe Kryten is cleaning in there and unplugged my emotion banks so he could hoover, or the Cat has turned off the neutral processors so he could plug in his hot wax machine. Or maybe my light bee is on its way out and isn’t connected to the mainframe anymore. In a few minutes I’ll probably just be a gibbering wreck in a hard-light husk and Lister will hate me for leaving him. Again._ Rimmer’s breath caught in his chest and he started to hyperventilate. He tried to reason with himself that, being dead, he didn’t actually need to breathe and could stop at any time, but that just made him think about being properly dead, being _gone_ dead, the kind of dead that meant he couldn’t snuggle with Lister in the evenings, and that just made his breathing even more erratic.

Lister stirred, his nap distributed by Rimmer’s heaving chest. He lifted his head and blinked blearily at the hologram, his eyebrows knitted together in concern. 

“Rimmer! What’s the matter, man?”

Rimmer tried to speak but couldn’t fit words in-between his shuddering breaths. He pushed Lister off him, clambered to his feet and stumbled across the room before bracing himself against the table.

Lister quickly followed him and laid a hand on Rimmer’s back, rubbing soft circles into the hologrammatic flesh. “Just try and breathe slow, Rimmer. In through your nose, out through your mouth, yeah? Try and relax, man.”

Although still caught in the throes of anxiety, the soothing motion of Lister’s hand calmed Rimmer down just enough to allow him to begin to even out his breathing and regain the power of speech.

“Panic attack”, he rasped. “I’m not, I’m not-“, he broke off as his breathing sped up again. 

Lister placed his other hand on Rimmer’s back as well and continued to rub gently. ““Right, panic attack. Do you know what caused it?”

Rimmer took a deep, shuddering breath. “Because I didn’t have one!”

“Have one what?”, Lister asked, confused.

“A panic attack!”

“Hang on”, said Lister. “Are you telling me that you’re havin’ a panic attack because you didn’t have a panic attack?”

“Precisely!”, Rimmer snapped, before leaning further over the table and continuing to pant. Lister’s ministrations on his back ceased and instead the shorter man grabbed Rimmer firmly by the shoulders and turned him around so they were facing each other.

“Rimmer, just talk to me, man! What’s going on?”

“It’s this room!”, Rimmer wailed. “It’s the Gazpacho Soup room! It’s the room that haunts my nightmares and in which my dreams were cruelly snatched away from me and yet I can’t seem to care! Which must mean that there is something horribly wrong with me and that soon I’ll shut down permanently and I’ll either just disappear completely or freeze in place and the Cat will use me as a hat stand!”

Lister blinked slowly as if trying to absorb a lot of information at once.

“What’s your middle name, Rimmer?”

“ _What_ ”?, asked Rimmer, so perplexed by this non sequitur that he suddenly stopped hyperventilating.

“Well”, Lister explained, “If you’re really shutting down and losin’ parts of your mind there’ll be more missin’ than just the memory of how you felt that night. So, what’s your middle name?”

“Judas”, Rimmer replied, not missing a beat.

“And the names of your brothers?”

“Howard, Frank and John.”

“The school you went to?”

“Io House.”

“The name of the company that runs the ship?”

“The Jupiter Mining Corporation.”

Lister’s hands moved down from Rimmer’s shoulders to his arms and he squeezed his biceps softly.

“And what do you think about Kryten?”

Rimmer huffed. “He’s a square headed git.”

“And Cat?”

“Feline imbecile with the concentration span of a brain damaged goldfish.”

“And what about Captain Hollister or Toddhunter or Petersen? How did you feel about them?”

“The undisputed champion of Mr All American Lard-Ass, insufferable posh goit, vile Danish gimboid with all the charisma of a particularly rude and putrid skunk.”

Lister took a step closer. “And how do you feel about me?”

Rimmer gazed down into Lister’s dark brown eyes and felt a blush rising in his cheeks. “You know how I feel about you”, he said softly.

Lister stood on his tiptoes, leant in and pressed a gentle kiss to Rimmer’s lips before stepping back with a smile. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, Rimmer.”

Rimmer blinked in confusion. “But there _must_ be! Why aren’t I panicking? It makes less sense than the plot of a Sylvester Stallone film!”

“It makes perfect sense, Rimmer!”, said Lister. “You’re not panicking because of some electrical fault or because Cat has decided it’s time to remove his leg hair, you’re not panicking because I think you’ve just got over it.”

Rimmer’s mouth fell open in shock. “ _Over it?_ Listy, the Gazpacho Soup incident was the single most humiliating experience of my life, how on Io would I have just gotten _over it?”_

“Because you’re not that person anymore, Rimmer!”, Lister exclaimed. “You were still really young when that happened!”

“I was thirty!”

“Thirty is still young!”, Lister protested, tugging on his dreads in exasperation. “I mean, most people are still figurin’ out who they are at that age; nobody’s properly grown up by then apart from antiques experts and chartered accountants and I’m pretty sure they’re just born old anyway. But you’ve been through so much smeg since then, man; you’ve been to an alternative universe where time runs backwards, you were a prisoner on a planet created by your own mind, you’ve battled GELF’s and simulants, you’ve learned that cloning yourself is a really, really bad idea and you even became Ace and went off to save the universe for a bit! Your world is so much bigger now than a bowl of smegging soup!”

“But it was the worst thing that even happened to me”, Rimmer said weakly, doubt creeping in his voice. “It haunts my dreams…”

“Yeah? When was the last time you dreamt about it? Last week, last year? Have you even dreamt about it in last decade?”

Rimmer’s mind raced. When was the last time he _had_ actually thought or dreamt about it? It had seemed just like yesterday when the memory had rushed back to him while lying on the carpet, but now that he had calmed down it was starting to feel like something that had happened a long time ago to someone who wasn’t quite him. When he had returned from being Ace it had been easy to slip back into his old ways, to wear his old persona like a cosy if slightly worn blanket. But was that really him anymore? He had seen and done so much since he’d died, both on board Red Dwarf and during his time as Ace, so many wonderful and horrific things, but he’d never really thought about how they might have changed him. But he had changed, hadn’t he? The person he used to be would never have been brave enough to amid his feelings for Lister, let alone start a romantic relationship with him. He stared at Lister, eyes wide.

“Do you really think I’ve just gotten over it?”

Lister nodded and stepped forward again. “Yeah, Rimmer, I really do.”

Rimmer’s shoulders slumped. “I never thought I’d get over it, not ever, and now apparently I have without even realising it. I mean, they were my final words, Listy! Gazpacho Soup. I thought nothing as terrible as that night would ever happen to me, that it was the worst thing to ever happen to anyone in the whole universe. But you’re right; after everything we’ve been through, after everything we’ve seen, the way I felt about that soup just seems…pathetic.”

“Hey now!”, said Lister. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No! Well, not exactly.” Lister frowned. “Look, when you’re young there’s always things that seem like they’re the whole world, you know? Like they’re the be all and end all, the thing that defines you, and then when you get a bit older and look back it’s like, a bit embarrassin’ to think that you ever felt so strongly about something that doesn’t seem very important anymore. But that doesn’t mean that you should be ashamed for ever feelin’ that way, because at the time it _was_ that important and at the end of the day it’s those things that make us _us,_ you know? The way you felt about that soup then helped to make you who you are today, along with a billion other things that might seem a bit silly now but without which you wouldn’t the person standing in front of me. Because of all those things you became the person that I fell in love with, rather than someone I just wanted to punch in the throat. Don’t get me wrong, you’re still a complete smeghead, but you’re so much more than that now. You’re so much more than you were, Rimmer.”

Tears pricked Rimmer’s eyes and he blinked rapidly to clear them. “When did you become so wise, Listy? Or have you just been taking learning drugs and making your way through the philosophy section of the library?”

Lister hit him lightly on the arm. “Oi! I’ve always been wise!”

They stood in silence for a moment, just looking at each other, before Rimmer spoke again.

“Did you really mean all those things, about me being more than I was?”, he asked tentatively.

Lister raised a hand to cup Rimmer’s jaw. “Yeah, I did.” He closed his eyes as he rested his forehead against Rimmer’s. “’Cause it true. After years of wadin’ through smeg and your own neuroses you’ve actually become an alright person, and I love you for that.”

Rimmer felt breathless again, although this time it was from pleasure rather than panic. He leant into Lister’s touch. “I love you too, Listy”, he said, his voice filled with tenderness. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything, more than my pet lemming or a well pressed uniform or a particularly thrilling game of Risk.”

They kissed, gentle and sweet. Lister placed his other hand on Rimmer’s hip and one of Rimmer’s arms snaked around Lister’s back, pulling him even closer. Just as the kiss began to intensify there was a loud rumble and Lister pulled away with a grimace, one hand falling to rest on his stomach.

“Think I need to get some grub. Come on, we’ll pick this up later.” He winked at Rimmer before walking over to his pile of discarded clothes.

Rimmer watched him go, eyes on Lister’s bare arse, before he tore his gaze away and looked down at his own body instead. He realised with a jolt that he was also still completely naked. “Uniform!” he barked and a fresh blue suit shimmered onto his body.

As Lister dressed, Rimmer turned his attention to the table. When he had first set eyes upon it on that night it had seemed so grand and intimidating, an Officer’s table in an Officer’s Club, but now he saw there was nothing special about it at all; it was just a table, and a rather drab one at that. Similarly, he could now see that the bowl of Gazpacho Soup had always just been a bowl of soup, despite the importance that he had attached to it at the time. A bowl of cold soup couldn’t love you or hold you or comfort you on the long and lonely nights; it was just a stupid smegging status symbol, a strange and frankly quite disgusting dish adopted by the kind of posh goits who went to public school and became politicians and laughed at the poor behind their backs. 

Rimmer walked over to the very chair that he himself had sat in three million years ago and ran a hand over its dusty velvet back. It was an odd feeling, to discover that you’d gotten over something that had once seemed so important without even realising that you had. The Rimmers had not been the sort family to forgive and forget; they had been the kind of people who held on to every grudge and petty jealously until the day they died. Great Aunt Susan had received a lifetime ban from family Sunday lunches at the age of eighty-seven for falling asleep during the main course and knocking a brimming gravy boat over a pristine hand-embroidered tablecloth belonging to Rimmer’s mother (although Rimmer had always suspected his Great Aunt was quite relieved to not have to attend the meal anymore; she was far too old for all the hopping, which is probably why she fell asleep in the first place). His brother Frank had cajoled his rival for Janine’s affections into being the best man at their wedding just so the poor sod was forced to watch another man marry the woman he loved; Rimmer still remembered the way he had broken down in tears during his speech and had to be carried out by Howard and John while Frank sneered evilly, clutching the hand of his new bride. The man who he had thought was his father had been the worst of them all, stretching his sons to ensure they could join the Space Corps just because he was rejected for being one inch below regulation height. There was, Rimmer realised, a distinct possibility that he was the first ever Rimmer to actually let something go. He allowed himself to feel a little smug about that.

“Hey”, said Lister as he wiggled back into his trousers, “Can you imagine the look on Captain Hollister’s face if he could see what we’ve done in here? Having sex in one of his precious Officer’s Clubs before declaring our love for each other stark smegging naked! He’d probably have a heart attack! It’d be a good revenge for the way he treated us, wouldn’t it?”

Rimmer snorted in amusement. “Yes, it certainly would Listy! Just a shame it’s three million years too late.”

Lister grinned. “Well, you know what they say, Rimmer; revenge is a dish-“

“I may have gotten over it, but if you finish that sentence with the phrase ‘best served cold’ I will garrotte you with a napkin ribbon.”

“I was going to say ‘revenge is a dish best served at whatever smegging temperature you want to serve it at’!” Lister replied defensively.

Rimmer rolled his eyes. “People don’t say that, Listy.”

“Yeah they do! ‘Cause I’m the only person left alive so whatever I say _is_ what people say. Besides, only proper disgusting things are served cold, like salad and that raw fish you get in fancy restaurants.”

“Sushi”, said Rimmer.

“Bless you”, said Lister. “Anyway, all the best things are served either hot or warm; curry, naan bread, lager. Talking of which, think I’ll get Kryten to knock me up a chicken balti for lunch. You comin’?"

“What, to watch you wolf down over spiced poultry with all the grace of a BEGG devouring a fresh pile of garbage? I may love you, Listy, but there are some things I draw a line at. Think I’ll finish looking at the rooms on this floor while you stuff your face.”

“No, you won’t!”, protested Lister, waggling a finger as he finished tying the laces on his boots and shrugged his jacket on. “You’ll ignore all the decent ones and choose one that looks like a crypt. Come on, quick lunch then we’ll finish lookin’ together.”

“Alright, fine”, Rimmer huffed. He walked to the door and held it open for Lister.

Lister sauntered over and stopped in the doorway, pressing Rimmer against the frame and brushing his lips against the hologram’s ear.

“And you know, the faster we eat and choose a room, the less time it’ll be before you can bend me over backwards and shag me into a mattress.” Lister stepped back with a wicked grin and started to walk down the corridor. Rimmer gulped and took a moment to compose himself before following swiftly behind.

As they walked Lister reached out and gave Rimmer’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “You OK now, Rimmer?”

“Yes”, said Rimmer, a rare but genuine smile lighting up his face. “In fact, I’d say I’m more than just OK.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes”, said Rimmer. “I’m super.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to janamelie, daveylisters and ohhhyestottytottytotty over on Tumblr for their help in figuring out how old Rimmer was during the Gazpacho Soup incident.
> 
> I was considering waiting until the 25th November to post this fic, but I’m been working on it for three smegging months and now it’s finally done I just really needed to post it and get it out into the world! (Or out into the Internet, at any rate). Hope you enjoyed it, dear reader, and hey – if you liked it you could always read it again on Gazpacho Soup day!


End file.
